Alicia Yamin continues Seminar Series with Jan. 28 talk, “Power, Suffering and the Struggle for Dignity: Human Rights Frameworks for Health and Why They Matter”

Alicia Ely Yamin, Visiting Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center and the Program Director of the Health and Human Rights Initiative, continues the Berman Institute’s 2018-19 Seminar Series with her talk, “Power, Suffering and the Struggle for Dignity: Human Rights Frameworks for Health and Why They Matter,” on Monday, Jan. 28 at noon in the School of Public Health’s Feinstone Hall.

Professor Yamin will articulate a vision of what applying a human rights framework to health can mean, and why it matters at this particular point in history in particular. In doing so, she will analyze shortcoming in the ways that human rights frameworks and human rights-based approaches are sometimes conceptualized and applied and why this should concern us. She will also provide examples from her own experience of how different aspects of human rights-based approaches to health have been promoted in concrete contexts by different actors, what it has meant in real people’s lives – and what we can learn from these experiences.

She is also an Adjunct lecturer on Law and Global Health at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health and a Global Fellow at the Center on Law and Social Transformation in Norway. In 2016, the UN Secretary General appointed Yamin to the Independent Accountability Panel for the Global Strategy on Women’s, Children’s and Adolescents’ Health (EWEC). She also serves as Associate Editor (Health Care Law and Policy) for the international, peer reviewed journal, BMC International Health and Human Rights.

Prior to joining Georgetown, Alicia was a Lecturer on Law and Global Health at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, Director of the JD /MPH Program, and the Policy Director at the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University. Trained in both law and public health at Harvard, Yamin’s 20+-year career at the intersection of health and human rights has bridged academia and activism. From 2007 to 2011, Yamin held the prestigious Joseph H. Flom Fellowship on Global Health and Human Rights at Harvard Law School. Prior to that, she served as Director of Research and Investigations at Physicians for Human Rights, where she oversaw all of the organization’s field investigations, and was on the faculty of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. Yamin was a member of the Board of Directors of the Center for Economic and Social Rights for 15 years and the Chair from 2009-2014. She remains on the Advisory Council of CESR.

Yamin is known globally for her pioneering scholarship and advocacy in relation to economic and social rights and rights-based approaches to health and development. She has contributed to and consulted on the drafting of multiple General Comments by UN treaty bodies, as well as UN Human Rights Council resolutions. She regularly leads judicial colloquia and strategic litigation courses for practitioners, as well as advising on specific cases, submitting amicus curiae petitions and providing expert testimony relating to the application of international and constitutional law to health issues.